18 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023 Why you Soon Won’t Be Able to Avoid AI – At Work or At Home Wall Street Journal Will U.S. states figure out how to regulate AI before the feds? Fortune AI girlfriends imperil generation of young men CNN The headlines are inescapable. Artificial Intelligence has become THE topic of 2023. Debates rage about its benefits/negatives as well as the future for this possibly lifealtering technology. Count lottery as another industry taking a careful look at AI and how it might impact game creation and delivery to players. Tackling this critical topic was a panel of experts on the lottery and vendor sides of the business whose core missions are likely to experience fundamental changes depending on where and how this technology is adopted and deployed. Panel moderator Drew Svitko, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Lottery, framed some of the issues and goals of the panel discussion. “Some of you might be thinking ‘why should I care about AI,’” he said. “Some of you might still be figuring out how to get your VCR clock to stop blinking and if that’s you, this might not be of help to you. But for some others, we hope this panel will provide a better idea of what AI is and how it’s already influencing our lives and businesses.” Joining Drew on the panel: Keith Cash, Vice President Global Instant Ticket Services, IGT Jacob Kreider, Senior Manager Business Intelligence, Scientific Games Mike Lightman, Chief Commercial Officer, IWG (Instant Win Gaming) Mark Mitchell, Director Business Intelligence and Analytics, Intralot, Inc. Jacob Kreider, who studied AI in graduate school at Northwestern University, provided some context to begin to understand the broad topic of AI and its subsets. “There are three things that make up intelligent systems,” he said. “There’s advanced data modeling, machine learning, and AI. Advanced data modeling has a lot of human input into how a problem is solved as the human decides what data is important and what approach to take. Machine learning is a subset of AI, as all machine learning is a type of AI but not all AI is a type of machine learning. Here, you define your end goal and feed in the data you think is important. AI is much different in that you give it a goal and let the system decide the best way to meet your goal, with very little instruction otherwise. It figures out the model to use, the approach to take, and what parameters are important. It’s still important to remember that you can’t completely remove the human because the human frames the questions and sets the goals, but AI does everything else.” With Jacob’s description of what AI is and is not in place, Drew asked the panelists to discuss how AI is being used in lottery. Mark Mitchell, who oversees this area for Intralot, pointed out that AI has actually been in use in the lottery industry for a number of years. “When you consider how a lottery receives notification of the need to refill a product before it actually runs out, or how to schedule the automatic delivery of products from a certain facility, these are actions driven by AI,” he said. “One reason AI is such a big topic now is because of ChatGPT. But AI has been in use by many different industries, including lottery, for many years. Its efficacy has been constantly improving, and the rate of improvement seems to be taking off exponentially. So I think we can expect a rapid expansion of its use in the lottery industry over the next few years.” As Mark observes, ChatGPT has led most of the discussions about AI. ChatGPT has been defined as a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks, such as composing emails, writing essays, and even writing software code. ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an AI and P A N E L D I S C U S S I O N Following is an executive summary of a one-hour panel discussion held at the PGRI Lottery Expo Conference in Nashville The Intersection of Intelligent Systems and Lottery Mark Mitchell Keith Cash Mike Lightman Jacob Kreider Drew Svitko
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